- Sapiens is a fun read
- Seconding A Short History of Nearly Everything
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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Asklemmy
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Human world history nah, I know several good books on beaver world history though.
Whole world? No, nothing satisfactory. Individual parts? I like Blackshirts and Reds because it's a quick read and Parenti is a fantastic writer, though it focuses more on historical analysis than reciting historical events. It talks more about history than tells you history, if that makes sense.
Blowback is a podcast and not a book, but is fantastic and is more of a "telling you history" podcast than talking about history, if you instead wanted to learn more events than analysis of them.
I haven't read it yet but I've heard good things about The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It's more about early history than modern history, though.
You can buy it here or download it from libgen.
This may not be what you’re looking for since you said “modern” but A Short History of Wine was a fun read and covers a ton of world history. It’s obviously through the lens of wine/alcohol but it’s often actually about trade networks, different cultures, and diplomacy.
It’s through a specific lens and doesn’t pretend to cover everything but alcohol pops up in history often enough that it almost mirrors economic history.
If that isn’t your thing, I would recommend regional history books. It’s almost impossible to cover all of human history without some sort of focus. Otherwise, it’s just a textbook and you can download a professor’s syllabus to find those.
The Things We Make by Bill Hammack is engaging and talks about the history of engineering as its own pioneering thing (and not just a practical application of scientific discoveries).
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn is pretty engaging.
1491 by Mann is a particular favorite of mine.
In the same vein as A Short History of Wine, there's also And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails by Wayne Curtis, Salt: A World History and Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky, and A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. The last one goes way, way back, and focuses on scientific topics, but it's an entertaining read, and helps provide context to the pre-modern era.
Here's one that I enjoyed and covers a critical period of modern East Asian history: "The Gate" by François Bizot.
It's him recounting how he travelled to Cambodia and was captured by the Khmer Rouge. He survived ... just ... By forming a relationship with Comrade Duch who
as the Chairman of Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison camp, and head of the Santebal, Kang Kek Iew was responsible for the interrogation and torture of thousands of individuals, and was convicted for the execution of at least 12,272 individuals, including women and children [Wikipedia]
While he covers the history of the Khmer Rouge period, his writing is highly empathic and discusses the suffering of himself and hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens at the hands of other ordinary citizens and how could this possibly happen. It's a highly emotional book.
Best of luck with your reading!
Piers anthony wrote a fantasy series with the idea of it being somewhat educational. It has this thing where the stories take place in different points in history and its like the characters are reincarnated but its not even quite like that. It is that everything that happened in the story has happened to the characters but the time period changes but at any particular point in the stories the characters would remember all the events as taking place in the time period they are currently in. Its hard to describe but I really liked it but I now notice there are five books and I only read the first three.
"How to Invent Everything" by Ryan North.
I'm hesitant to suggest it because it is not exactly a 'history' book per se. It might not have the specifics, depth, breadth or even content you are looking for but I found it to be very, very engaging.
From the website for the book: It’s a (fictional) time machine repair guide that (non-fictionally) explains how to reinvent civilization from scratch.